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Teachers often tell students to write notes instead of type notes to retain the information being presented more effectively. Scientists and psychologists describe what is going on in the brain that helps us retain the information more effectively while writing notes.

Here are the research take-aways: 1. Repetition of tasks - reading, or saying words over and over - continues to be the best method for transforming short-term memories into long-term ones. To do that, we have to retrain our minds to focus on one task at a time. 2. Don't cram. When you rehearse knowledge and practice it often, it sticks, research has shown. So if you can incorporate what you're trying to remember into daily life, ideally over time, your chances of retaining it drastically improve. Space out repetition over the course of days. 3. Sit down and stay put. Memory and focus go hand-in-hand. Dr. Cowan suggests rearranging our office setup to minimize distractions. Stop engaging in useless tasks like surfing the web and just tackle whatever it is you need to work on. Then watch your focus soar and your memory improve. 4. Incentivize moments and read cues. Use visual or verbal cues for items like keys - to associate places and things. Set reminders.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

When people talk about positive and negative emotions they often use spatial metaphors. A happy person is on top of the world, but a sad person is down in the dumps. Some researchers believe these metaphors are a clue to the way people understand emotions: not only do we use spatial words to talk about emotional states, we also use spatial concepts to think about them. Researchers Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) ran 2 experiments. In the first experiment, students had to move glass marbles upward or downward into one of two cardboard boxes, with both hands simultaneously, timed by a metronome. Meanwhile, they had to recount autobiographical memories with either positive or negative emotional valence, like "Tell me about a time when you felt proud of yourself', or 'a time when you felt ashamed of yourself.' Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences. Memory retrieval was most efficient when participants' motions matched the spatial directions that metaphors in language associate with positive and negative emotions. The second experiment tested whether seemingly meaningless motor actions, e.g. moving marbles up or down, could influence the content of people's memories. Participants were given neutral-valence prompts, like "Tell me about something that happened during high school," so they could choose to retell something happy or sad. Their choices were determined, in part, by the direction in which they were assigned to move marbles. Moving marbles upward encouraged students to recount positive high school experiences like "winning an award," but moving them downward to recall negative experiences like "failing a test." "These data suggest that spatial metaphors for emotion aren't just in language," Casasanto says, "linguistic metaphors correspond to mental metaphors, and activati

Study shows that children taught words then tested on the next day score better than those tested the same day Nothing beats a good night's sleep for helping youngsters learn new words, new research has revealed. A study suggests that even the brightest children remember words best when they're given a chance to sleep on it.

Excellent study. "While it has long been recognized that certain areas in the brain's left hemisphere enable us to understand and produce language, scientists are still figuring out exactly how those areas divvy up the highly complex processes necessary to comprehend and produce language. ... Two brain areas called Broca's region and Wernicke's region serve as the main computing hubs underlying language processing, with dense bundles of nerve fibers linking the two ... Working with patients suffering from language impairments because of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, Wilsons' team used brain imaging and language tests to disentangle the roles played by the two pathways. ... The study marks the first time it has been shown that upper and lower tracts play distinct functional roles in language processing."

While the left hemisphere of the brain is where the processing and understanding of language is, different sections of the brain control different parts of language. Two separate areas of the brain control the ability to remember and understand specific words, and the other controls how we construct sentences and make sense of them. If one of these sections is damaged, the other can still work properly, so it is possible to be able to remember words and what they mean but not know how to create sentences.

Oral forms like ballads and epics exist in every culture, originating long before the advent of written language. In preliterate eras, tales had to be appealing to the ear and memorable to the mind or else they would simply disappear. After all, most messages we hear are forgotten, or if they're passed on, they're changed beyond recognition - as psychologists' investigations of how rumors evolve have shown. In his classic book Memory in Oral Traditions, cognitive scientist David Rubin notes, "Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. If a tradition is to survive, it must be stored in one person's memory and be passed on to another person who is also capable of storing and retelling it. All this must occur over many generations… Oral traditions must, therefore, have developed forms of organization and strategies to decrease the changes that human memory imposes on the more casual transmission of verbal material." What are these strategies? Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics - memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it.

Information set to music, suggests research, is better retained, as it taps into time- honored strategies that help information stick. Tales that last for many generations tend to describe concrete actions rather than abstract concepts. They use powerful visual images. They are sung or chanted. And they employ patterns of sound: alliteration, assonance, repetition and, most of all, rhyme. A study by Rubin showed that when two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme, contemporary college students remember them better than non-rhyming words. Such universal characteristics of oral narratives are, in effect, mnemonics-memory aids that people developed over time "to make use of the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of human memory," as Rubin puts it. Songs and rhymes can be used to remember all kinds of information. A study just published in the journal Memory and Cognition finds that adults learned a new language more effectively when they sang it.

"When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time - a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin."

This commercial is about Progressive, a insurance company. In most of the commercials, they use the "Red Herring" fallacy, bringing an irrelevant matter into the conversation. At the end of the commercial, Flo talks about his feminine looking shoulder bag randomly, which displays the fallacy stated above. I think they do this so observers remember the commercial as informative but at the same time entertaining.

Research shows that under some conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other situations music makes it worse - sometimes dangerously so. Absorbing and remembering new information is best done with the music off, suggests a 2010 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Nick Perham, the British researcher who conducted the study, notes that playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your arousal - if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks. Music might enhance performance if a well-practiced expert, e.g. a surgeon, needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to execute a job he's done many times before, but not all physicians in the operating room agree re: the benefits of music. A study of anaesthetists suggested that many felt that music distracted them from carrying out their expected tasks. Another study found that singing or listening to music while operating a simulated car increased drivers' mental workload and slowed responses to potential hazards, leading them to scan their visual field less often and to focus instead on the road right in front of them. Other iPod rules drawn from the research: Classical or instrumental music enhances mental performance more than music with lyrics. Music can make rote or routine tasks (think folding laundry or filing papers) less boring and more enjoyable. Runners who listen to music go faster. But when you need to give learning and remembering your full attention, silence is golden.

A team of researchers at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital use computers to analyze the language of suicide notes, in the hope that they can better identify those at risk. By comparing patient interview responses to suicide notes, they can identify how similar or divergent their language is from the language of suicide.Here are three patterns researchers have identified in their corpus of authentic suicide notes: 1. Loss of hope. When hope is gone, when hopelessness emerges - and that's in most of the notes 2. Practical instruction, e.g.. "Remember to change the tires. Remember to change the oil. I drew a check, but I didn't put the money in. Please go ahead and make the deposit." 3. The presence of the following emotions: depression, a little bit of anger, abandonment, and the sense of "I just can't go on any longer. I can't deal with this any longer."

Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.

While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

This article shows new evidence which suggests that language is learned in circuits that are used for many other purposes, instead of the common claim that language acquisition occurs in a specific part of the brain dedicated to the purpose. How good we are at remembering vocabulary relates to how good we are at declarative memory, which is used to remember shopping lists or people's faces. Grammar in children, on the other hand, correlates most strongly to procedural memory which is used for driving or playing an instrument.

You know the word exists, and you know what it means, but you just can't spit it out. It's one of the most frustrating feelings. New research suggests the forgetfulness may have to do with how frequently we use certain words. The findings could help scientists understand more about how the brain organizes and remembers language.

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details-rather than the big picture-when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments detailed in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information," wrote researchers Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College and Geoff Kaufman of Carnegie Mellon University.